Restore a file's modification time in Git

Question

I understand the default Git behaviour of updating the modification time every time it changes a file, but there are times when I want to restore a file\'s original modifica

Answer 1

Just giving my two cents here.
It takes most of what @stefanct proposed but while implementing a similar script I just added a parallel feature.

In my case (1000 files) I went from 60 seconds to 15 seconds to do the operation doing it in parallel.

#!/bin/bash

change_date() {
      local dd=`git log -1 HEAD --pretty="%ci" -- $1`
      if [ -z "$dd" ];
      then echo "$1 is not versionned";
      else touch -d "$dd" $1;
      fi
}
#list_of_files = find .
list_of_files=`git ls-tree -r -t --full-name --name-only HEAD`

for f in $list_of_files;do
  if test "$(jobs | wc -l)" -ge 16; then
    wait
  fi
  {
    change_date  $f;
  } &
done
wait

You can adjust the number of parallel jobs allowed by changing this line

test "$(jobs | wc -l)" -ge 16

Answer 2

The following shell script should work on any POSIX-compatible system to set the modification and access timestamp of all tracked files (and directories). The only downside I could determine yet is that it is quite slow but that's fine for my use case (setting the right dates when producing release archives).

rev=HEAD
for f in $(git ls-tree -r -t --full-name --name-only "$rev") ; do
    touch -d $(git log --pretty=format:%cI -1 "$rev" -- "$f") "$f";
done

Answer 3

We had the same issue at work, and have been using successfully the git-store-meta perl script by Danny Lin.

It definitely solved the problem indicated in your question.